Maiden Voyages

by Mary Morris

  from FAREWELL SPAIN

  In retrospect I admire Salamanca and desire to return there, but while I was in the place for a variety of capricious reasons I did not truly appreciate it.

  The journey there from Santiago had been a desperate business—occupying from four in the afternoon until seven the next morning. In broiling weather, and with a change of trains and two hours’ delay at Astorga at 2 A.M. However, Spain can’t help being a large place, and complicated cross-country journeys between its provincial towns must be taken philosophically. But on arrival there and at an attractive hotel on the Plaza Mayor, to be coldly assured that there could be no question of coffee or of hot water until after nine o’clock, for some mystic reason for ever withheld—that did not help my never very philosophic temperament towards sympathy with Salamanca. Withal, dejected and dirty, to have to say a sudden good-bye to a conception which had held my imagination strongly since childhood, I really got off on the wrong foot in Salamanca.

  When I was ten and read the Lay of the Last Minstrel I took a tenacious liking to the name of the place where Michael Scott got his magic—Salamanca’s Cave. This liking stayed with me and brought a specific idea with it, or rather two ideas, a picture and an intention. A picture of a dark, small rainy place of grey stone, where it was practically always night, and where everything was done by stealth and almost as if by sleep-walkers. And an intention to see it. It is the only place which I remember when I was young being absolutely determined to see sometime. God knows why, because the above description of my fantasy, which is as near as I can get to it, strikes me as revolting now, and I wasn’t, I think, overweeningly interested in magicians and their goings-on. But I liked the words “Salamanca’s Cave,” and they made me curious. “Curious” is the mot juste, I think—nothing else. The curiosity stayed with me in adult life. So that honestly—I’m not trying to be whimsy-whamsy now—when I at last saw Salamanca I was quite considerably set back, superior though the bright reality is to my dank and silly notion. It was all the more childish of me to be surprised, as, although this town was new to me then, Castile was not, and I ought to have realised that there would be no chance of finding darkness, rain and sleep-walkers in any corner of that alive and vivid region. Still—my brain was not functioning well that morning. It was battered—practically in shreds. For I had travelled for fifteen hours in the company of the Barber of Salamanca and his silent wife and brother-in-law. They were returning from their summer holiday on the coast, and were very kind to us when we boarded the train. Gave us good advice about this and that, and, incidentally, told us to go to our unwelcoming but, as it afterwards proved, very pleasant hotel. (I had been going to go to the “Bull’s Head” where Borrow stayed, and which was listed in my 1932 Spanish Hotel book as good and inexpensive. But this nearly killed the Barber! How did I possibly not know that that hotel had been pulled down last May, and was being rebuilt? But how did I not know? He laughed till the tears flowed.) Anyway the Barber talked all night, and fidgeted and chuckled and talked and talked. All through the long pause in the canteen at Astorga too—where we leant in strange green lamplight against a wall and waited for very bad coffee; where I remember Mary muttered to me—in a surprising pause of the Barber’s—that the Barber’s brother-in-law was a Picasso harlequin. He had a masked and weary face. The Barber was physically a Sancho Panza but with none of Sancho’s wit and less of his steadiness. I shall remember him for ever. I am tired already now through letting the memory of him become too definite.

  Salamanca was his mania. He was just that proud of it he couldn’t say! Not as an ancient university town of fame and beauty—though of course he wouldn’t have a word said against a single stone of it, however old and out of date—No, Sir! But he admired Salamanca as their citizens might admire, say, Omaha, or Carthage, Ill.

  Boredom is of two kinds, passive and active. The passive kind tells on one in the end, but the active is immediate agony, and leaves a cicatrice that is liable to throb again if touched in later life. I am rather subject to active boredom—but the scar inflicted by the Barber of Salamanca is one of my worst, and will never be completely insensitive. (It is certainly as bad as that inflicted by two women whom I knew in America fifteen years ago, and which still responds uneasily to my memory of them.) I have sometimes believed that I could see shadows spread under people’s eyes when they were being frantically bored. I have seen faces age and sag under the onslaught of amiable extrovertism—and then I’ve known exactly what was happening in the victims’ agonised heads. Well, the Barber turned night into day that night. He told me—the others were feigning sleep, but I couldn’t because I can’t keep still when I’m in pain—he told me the seating capacity of every restaurant and cinema in Salamanca. He told me the names of all the films which had come to those cinemas since their inception—and his own opinions on them. He told me the names of all the cafés and hotels, of all the doctors, dentists, lawyers, chemists and shoeblacks. He told me everyone’s income, and the make of everyone’s car. He corrected himself, he recanted, he woke his wife to get her ruling on certain statistics, he did sums, he remembered, he recalled, he agreed with himself. He was right—that was so, yes, of course he was right! Ha, ha! And he began again. In sheer delight he began again. He boasted frightfully without a pause.

  That was the night we put down. So that as dark lifted outside from the scene which, with certain parts of Ireland, I believe to be without peer for beauty, as light returned to the golden plain that I had not seen for twelve months and exposed its morning innocence, the stillness of its villages, the peace of its scattered shepherds standing like Gothic saints among their gentle goats—I didn’t care, I couldn’t look.

  And when the frantic business was over, when there had been about five sweet minutes of the silence and absence of the Barber, to be told—in the minimum of quiet words, I admit—that for two hours there could be no kind of reviving drink! Is it odd if I decided to hate Salamanca?

  Eventually of course there was coffee. A bath, aspirin and sleep. In a lovely bed in a room with a marble floor. So that by afternoon one was able to light a cigarette, stroll on the balcony and look at Salamanca. Unfortunately some facts of the Barber’s about the recent removal of the trees from the Plaza Mayor, and the why and the wherefore of it all, came over one in a muddled rush—you know how nightmares can create a hang-over. But I had myself in hand a bit at last. I refused to bother about the trees. The Plaza is lovely without them, anyhow. It is very wide, and quite square, I think. It is all of a piece, pure seventeenth century, colonnaded on its four sides, and with light, narrow balconies running along the first and second floors. All the houses are of the same height, four storeys—rather low and ample of face. The Town Hall, in the centre of the eastern side, and some other public office exactly facing it on the west, are more decorated than the other façades, but Baroque had laid its young, light hand symmetrically and thoughtfully over the whole square, which is full of Castilian sunlight. It is a most satisfactory example of civic building. A bright and inviting Plaza.

  I remembered Borrow’s sneers at the sinister clerics mumbling and plotting together under the colonnades. Those were the dark Carlist days, of course. And these are darker days for Spain, but the clerics seem to be well and truly muzzled now. Not much plotting left for them to do even here in their centuries-old preserve on which their tradition has impressed so much nobility. Curiously tough and engaging, that bigoted, honest fellow, Borrow. Catholic in all my blood, for years I could not bring myself to read The Bible in Spain. The idea of a member of the English Bible Society setting out to sell Bibles to Spain might suggest courage, but there was also too much obtuseness in it to make the record seem worth reading. However, in the end I read and re-read it. It is a shrewd and entertaining book—and yet, as the writer records with a faintly smug simplicity his conversations and friendly negotiations with this bookseller, that professor and the other priest, one has an embarrassing suspicion that, for all his shr
ewdness and working knowledge of human nature, his sturdy leg was sometimes gravely and unostentatiously pulled. Maybe I’m wrong. Anyway, when he was in Salamanca he had dealings with the Irish priests at the Irish Seminary—and his generous tribute to them, which sweeps him on exuberantly to toast the Irish scene and Irishwomen, comes very sweetly and disarmingly from the self-confident Bible-seller.

  And that reminds me of my duty in regard to his book. I don’t often borrow books, but I borrowed Borrow’s Bible in Spain, and left it, where it might well feel at home, in a bedroom in Burgos. I borrowed it again—merely to look up something—in London. And it has disappeared again—vanished out of my flat. It really looks as if one of these days I shall have to buy three copies of The Bible in Spain.

  In spite of the Barber, or perhaps because of him, I did not find the Salamanca cinemas up to much, or the cafés either. Though I suppose the latter were all right. Any café would serve under those colonnades with that sunny square to look out upon. And Salamancans, like all Spaniards, live out of doors, taking incessant leisurely paseitos, little strolls. So that except at the siesta hour, there is ample entertainment without going into cinemas. It is a widespread town, built harmoniously outward from the Plaza over the sides of a hardly perceptible hillock. The river Tormes washes past it, flowing west to join the Douro at the Portuguese frontier. All about is the open, austere plain, broken around the city’s skirts and, in some of the squares, by acacia trees and lines of poplars. Almost every façade in Salamanca is beautiful, and the general tone is of buff, or of granite that is almost white. The famous Gothic House of the Shells seems at first a pretty novelty, but after a day or two one is weary of it. The Cathedral, romanesque-renascence and sandstone, like Santiago, falls very far indeed below the standard set for it by Galicia, for though from far off, from across the river, it can look noble enough with baroque tower and dome, close up its details irritate, and the bright splendours of the interior are quite shocking. There is more than a touch of the Barber’s civic swagger about the inside of his Cathedral. But the big Dominican church of San Estéban is beautiful and beautifully cloistered. And they have a confessional box there—as in many other churches of Castile—where Saint Teresa confessed her sins. And the little church of San Martín is lovely romanesque.

  In the University they show you, preserved now, not used, the lecture-room of Luis de León, and the guide tells the good story, that you already know, but that bears repeating—that the great poet-theologian, editor of Saint Teresa, was arrested by the Inquisition in 1572, and kept a prisoner for four and a half years while the Holy Office tried to trap him into heresy; he was released in 1576 and restored to his chair in Salamanca, and that on the day of his first lecture after his return, when the hall was packed and everyone expected some dramatic piece of self-justification—he took his chair and began: “Gentlemen, as I said in my last lecture …” His lecture-room is very pleasant, whitewashed and luminous, with the narrow worn benches and ledges for note-taking heavily scarred with initials of forgotten theologians. The whole University is attractive, with renascence staircases, sunny courts and whitewashed lecture-halls. And the Irish Residencia, still full of Irish seminarists, is a place of quiet grassy courts and sixteenth-century cloisters.

  When I read now in the books of journalists who have come back from the Spanish war of the brave new idea of some of the anti-clericals to save the more beautiful churches and convents from the anarchists—save the structures, that is, letting them have the furniture to burn—and to use them for garages and markets and so on, I am, I confess, very much bewildered. Of course, if there is to be no more praying, if that is done with for ever—then the number of empty museum churches, too beautiful to destroy, which Spain will have on her hands, will be a very ludicrous burden. But garages, markets! Oh, Heaven, how humourless people can be, how smugly blind to the strong reality behind life’s great expressons! Will they make a dance-hall of Santiago de Compostela? No, no. The thing is not so easy as all that. Young men born yesterday can’t be so ridiculously right when apparently all the centuries have been so wrong. They must think again about what to do with their priceless, emptied structures. Give me an anarchist every time rather than these bright, utilitarian dullards.

  But let us leave Salamanca—by the same long and many-arched bridge over which a very famous son of the region departed about four hundred years ago on the first of his cynical adventures—as a blind man’s guide. Lazarillo de Tormes, better known to modern Spaniards, who really know the comic characters of their literature, than the great Luis de León. Lazarillo’s story, written anonymously, appeared in 1554 and was the first picaresque novel. It is very short, and in its manner of matter-of-fact, laconic cynicism had probably never been bettered. It shows the Spanish genius in one of its most successful and characteristic moods, realistic and cruel humour. I have not read it in Castilian, though I believe it must be limpid and easy reading for a foreigner, but in its contemporary English version by David Rowland, so strongly recommended by Fitzmaurice Kelly. Lazarillo is a young devil who lives on his wits, and tells his own past adventures when, as town-crier of Toledo, with a wife who is under the benevolent protection of the Archdeacon of San Salvador, he has reached his peak of bland prosperity. It is an admirably neat and amusing story and, as the authoritative Fitzmaurice Kelly says, “may be read with as much edification and amusement as on the day of its first appearance.” So over the bridge with us, seeking less tricky fortune than Lazarillo, and only looking back to reflect that Salamanca is at its best in this perspective—seen as a whole, as a shapely assemblage, a successful municipal achievement. Which it would please the Barber to hear. God be with him. And now two hours to Avila by bus. Two hours of summer evening on a Castilian road.

  MAUD PARRISH

  (1878–1976)

  In her memoir, Maud Parrish relates her life of madcap adventure with the breathless, excitable energy of one who cannot stand still. Parrish worked as a dance-hall girl in Dawson City, Yukon, and Nome, Alaska (after she had fled from an ill-fated marriage), and operated a gambling house in Peking at the turn of the century. With her “nine pounds of luggage” and a banjo, she claimed to have gone around the world sixteen times, up and down continents, and around and about exotic islands. Parrish died at the age of 98. Nine Pounds of Luggage was her only book.

  from NINE POUNDS OF LUGGAGE

  So I ran away. I hurried more than if lions had chased me. Without telling him. Without telling my mother or father. There wasn’t any liberty in San Francisco for ordinary women. But I found some. No jobs for girls in offices like there are now. You got married, were an old maid, or went to hell. Take your pick.

  That didn’t help much—just made worry for everybody. My parents finally found me and took me home. My husband’s family came out, some all the way from their dear “old New England” home, and begged me to come back to their only son. I just couldn’t do it. There was nothing the matter with him for somebody else. He might have made a good husband for another. So I tried to get a divorce.

  But the poor old judge said I was too young. There must be a reconciliation. Something about the fine old East and the fresh young West getting along together. But those pretty words were a short-lived prophecy. As I rose to leave the courtroom, the fine old East delegation sneered a bit too much for my little five-foot-two mother who was born and raised in California. She knocked a couple of teeth down my still husband’s throat, flattening out one Maine grin. Pa tossed him down a flight of stairs. The opposing lawyers calmly put down their brief cases and went to work on each other.

  Soon the whole courtroom was in an uproar. I’ve seen some real battles in dance halls all over the world, but few to beat that one. Some of the proper, if pinched, Maine aunts fainted, others got out smelling salts, and the fight surged into the corridors. Everybody from everywhere else in the City Hall came to see, and soon all the grudges in the place were being ironed out in the mêlée. Like when two dogs bark and f
ight and other dogs—from Gawd knows where—come and stop, look and listen, and then pile in just for the fun of it.

  By this time, I, “the bone” the fight was over, had crawled under the bench. The judge had left to join the fight. I saw ink bottles comet across space. I heard a skull crack with a noise like a batted baseball. Even a heavy chair slid off a bald head in a way that made me wince as I held my hand over my eyes.

  It was a mess by the time the ambulances and patrol wagons came. The lawyers were in rags, hats were crushed, shirt-tails (those left whole) hung out. Both victors and vanquished were carted off.

  That couldn’t happen since the “passing of the old West,” but I never hear the expression “rugged individualism” that I don’t think of that courtroom fight.

  My father took me to some of his land in Trinity County, to get away from the scandal that nearly sunk the Maine. I had time to think it out up there, walking or riding horseback, in the woods. I knew I couldn’t go back to the husband the judge had left me tied to legally. And to me that meant I couldn’t live in San Francisco. Some see life in black and white; others—and they’re the lucky ones—in old-gold hues. But the life I knew then made me see red. Wanderlust can be the most glorious thing in the world sometimes, but when it gnaws and pricks at your innards, especially in spring, with your hands and feet tied, it’s awful. So I left. Without telling a soul.